African Film Press (AFP) has selected three critics who will join us in choosing the winner of the AFP Critics Prize at Open Doors, the Locarno Film Festival's co-production and talent development platform, running 5 to 10 August in Locarno, Switzerland.
Kelvin Kariuki, Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku, and Ini-Abasi Jeffrey will deliberate with AFP's three co-founders — Tambay Obenson, Jennifer Ochieng, and Ikeade Oriade — to pick the winning film from the five African short films in this year's Open Doors Screenings.
This is the first time AFP has brought critics from outside the alliance into the selection process, and it will be the model going forward. The prize was created to build mainstream critical attention for African cinema on the continent and to give a platform to a new generation of African critics.
The Critics
Kelvin Kariuki is a Nairobi-based filmmaker, poet, and film critic writing for Sinema Focus. Working on both sides of the camera gives him a practitioner's eye for storytelling and the technical craft of filmmaking.
Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku is a Lagos-based writer and film critic covering African cinema wherever it travels, from Sundance to the Africa International Film Festival. She is an editor at Afrocritik, where she heads the Film & TV Desk and oversees the publication's newsletters. She is also a practising lawyer with a master's degree in Legislative Drafting.
Ini-Abasi Jeffrey is a freelance film writer with bylines in OkayAfrica, What Kept Me Up, In Nollywood, and The Lagos Review, among others. His writing treats films as cultural evidence of the anxieties of Nigerian storytelling.
The Films in Contention
"Concrete Moves" — Fagamou Fama Ndiaye (Senegal, 2025, 12 min): A school trip to the Mamelles lighthouse in Dakar, where a snake once frightened the director as a child, sends her back to the same hill decades later to find a coastline remade by construction. Ndiaye uses dance, archival images, and the snake as a figure for a city shedding its skin.
"Goat" — Judy Kibinge (Kenya, 2025, 28 min): City couple Suki and Benjamin drive to a remote goat farm, where Suki works out that this is not the romantic getaway she was promised: an ancient Mugumo tree wants repayment of a debt she never knew she owed. Kibinge's first film in more than a decade.
"sKINs_Addis Abeba" — Rediet Haddis Yalew (Ethiopia, 2026, 17 min): An experimental documentary about young people in Addis Ababa living with gentrification, religious conservatism, and surveillance. Yalew works with non-linear images, voice, sound, and movement, treating the body and the city as a single subject.
"Submergido" — Ariel Añez (Mozambique, 2025, 14 min): Amarildo disappears while fighting in Cabo Delgado, and rumours spread that he has joined the insurgents. His brother Sérgio goes home to tell the family. Añez's first film, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
"Time to Change" — Poças Pascoal (Portugal/Angola, 2024, 6 min): A wordless assembly of archival footage that ties colonial land seizure, big-game hunting, and the exploitation of people to the environmental collapse of the present.
About the Prize
The AFP Critics Prize consists of a monogrammed certificate bearing the jury's citation and signatures, a US$500 cash award, and continuing editorial coverage of the winner and their future work across AFP's three founding publications: Akoroko, Sinema Focus, and What Kept Me Up.
The inaugural prize was presented on 5 December 2025 at the 5th S16 Film Festival in Lagos to Nigerian filmmaker Dika Ofoma for his short film "Obi Is a Boy." Ofoma took part in the first year of Open Doors' Africa cycle with his feature project "Kachifo (Till the Morning Comes)."
Two more editions follow this year, each with a different jury: a return to S16 in Lagos in December, and a third partner festival on the continent, to be announced.
Locarno Open Doors is in the second year of a four-edition cycle dedicated to 42 African countries. The 2026 awards will be handed out on 10 August.
African Film Press is a cross-regional publishing alliance covering the African film, television, and digital media markets.